Walter Salas-Humara

Walter Salas-Humara is the chief songwriter for and a founding member of The Silos, a rock band formed in 1985 in New York City with Bob Rupe. The Silos were voted the Best New American Band in the Rolling Stone Critics Poll of 1987, and have released more than a dozen albums to date. As indicated by its name, which suggests both agrarian populism and impending apocalypse, the band shows influences of post-punk East Village experimentalism as well as the nascent country-rock revivalism that would return at decade’s end. As described by Stephen Holden in the New York Times, “The band’s austere style inflects the astringent twang of the Velvet Underground with the drone of R.E.M. and adds countryish echoes that recall Gram Parsons.”

Salas-Humara has also recorded four solo records, numerous live albums and several one-offs with other songwriters, and has produced albums for other artists. He is of Cuban-American extraction and known for his occasional use of Spanish-language lyrics. He also works as a painter and visual artist.

Conceived in Havana, Cuba and born in New York City, Walter Salas-Humara grew up in South Florida with his two older brothers after his family relocated to Ft. Lauderdale when he was three. He began playing drums at age seven, performing with a series of prog-rock and disco bands throughout adolescence. A cross-country road trip before his senior year of high school, which he spent at the progressive Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Colorado, instilled in him a lifelong wanderlust, and led directly to his taking up the guitar and beginning to write songs. He attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he studied visual arts and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. While in college, he co-founded the original version of the Vulgar Boatmen.

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